


Just a Phase

by BurningBehindMyEyes



Series: What Lies Beneath [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Gen, Mental Illness, Negative Body Image, Questioning Sexuality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 04:53:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10892106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BurningBehindMyEyes/pseuds/BurningBehindMyEyes
Summary: Damian's not sure when it started. But there was then and there was now and they were so wildly different that it was like comparing night and day. Except now the sun was gone and Damian was left alone in the darkness of his own mind and it wasn't pretty up there.Damian's not sure who he is.But he's told it's just a phase.Just a phase.If it was just a phase, what did that make Damian?





	Just a Phase

**Author's Note:**

> This is based off my own experiences with mental illness. Please do not read this if this will trigger anything in you. This fic deals with mental illness and negative body image and the question of sexualities.  
> If this bothers you, this is not the fic for you.

Damian wasn't sure when it had started, or even when he had begun noticing it. But when Grayson clapped his shoulder and grinned, complimenting him on a job well done, Damian didn't feel anything. When his Father smiled and nodded, all he got in return was a blank nothingness and a faked smile. When Drake grudgingly admitted Damian was right, Damian felt no pride or sense of accomplishment. When Todd chuckled at his eagerness and jumped in with the same gusto on patrol, Damian didn't feel any sense of companionship. He didn't know when it started, but now there was just a clear definition between then and now and Damian didn't know where the line was exactly. But there was then, when Grayson radiated warmth like the sun, and there was now, where numb was the only thing Damian could bring himself to feel. It happened on and off. Sometimes he could feel and other times it just wasn't happening.

That was okay though. Sometimes numb was better than feeling anything. Like when Grayson's smile turned upside down and Father would shake his head and the crushing sense of disappointment that should be there just doesn't come because Damian's emotional output was next to none.

There were hours in between being numb, where Damian could feel and often it wasn't happy. Because then all of the emotions would come rushing in at once, suffocating him in a brilliance that he locked inside of a bottle deep in his chest. It was shaken violently, cracked and fractured and leaking out the wave of feeling that sometimes Damian just couldn't stand.

Some days the numb was hard. When he should be feeling proud but just... can't. There's a block, one that he can't see or feel and the happiness washes away like seaweed on the shore. Loose and fragile, and it never stays for long. Those were the days where Damian couldn't paint or play, where all he did was lie on his bed and stare at the wall. Where he blasted music and almost wanted to cry but there was nothing to cry about. And maybe sometimes, Damian thought he couldn't. When he played on his phone all day but didn't text anyone, where barbs and insults wouldn't end with painful retribution, but just a blank stare. Damian wasn't sure what was worse - feeling or numbness. And while he knew that his mind was responsible for his emotions, it felt like his heart or stomach were, when his chest squeezed in pain and his stomach rolled and anxiety travelled down his limbs. He knew, objectively, that depression and anxiety happened in the brain. But if you asked him, anxiety happened in the stomach and depression took hold of the heart and this was where they started-

But not where they ended. Damian couldn't bring himself to feel. Just feel. His heart was locked tight and while his fingers brushed things he knew were there, his heart felt none of it. It squeezed in his chest, and numb settled into his bones. His eyebrows relaxed and his smile waned, his arms going to merely dangle and his legs shaking. Depression was the numb the lack of anything to make something anything. In those moments, anxiety was the everything to depression's nothing, the feeling to fill in the blanks when depression cut Damian off. It was encompassing, held his stomach in a tight grip and just allowed its influence to seep through. It made his stomach tighten, his nerves alight, and his brain to call for danger. It made him dread jumping between buildings as if he had never done so and could not, almost as if anxiety was trying to tell him that he could fall. Damian knew that he wouldn't. Anxiety didn't so it continued to tell him otherwise. And the one time he flubbed a jump was the one time he began to hesitate. Sometimes it didn't even take a bad experience, like the sight of the Titans Tower. He had never been in danger there, yet the idea of walking inside was sometimes so terrible that he felt fighting the Joker would be more appealing.

Damian began to avoid things. Places. He skirted around the windows on the Watchtower and Titans Tower, always closed the drapes around his own at home, stayed to the wall when walking through a balcony and pretended that the pounding of his heart while scaling a building was nothing more than adrenaline. When he began to jump at the little things his pets did and when he analyzed every face every minute of every day and reacted, for good or for worse.

It wasn't something wrong with him. It was something he had to live with. Eventually, the numbness became constant and he began to act as if he was always numb. Never speaking much, smiling less and less, his temper curbed, and he acted with more caution. It seemed to please Father especially with the gradual change in attitude, the topic coming up once and a while during dinner. Someone would explain how much Damian had grown, physically, mentally. Someone would agree, another - likely Todd or Drake - would say something rude about Damian as a child and when he didn't react, they'd laugh. Todd would often say that he almost missed knives getting flung at his face.

But when he was happy, those days were full of warmth. A gentle sun seemed to blossom in his chest and his eyes lit up. He felt light and carefree, confident and unplagued by the anxiety that haunted his bones. He could smile again, and his body almost seemed to produce more heat. He felt safe and comfortable, more likely to accept embraces and falling asleep on someone's shoulder. Those were the days Damian lived for, when he was happy. When he could look himself in the mirror and smile at his reflection, instead of sifting through every piece of hair and scar on his face, analyzing and judging. When he didn't wear his hood up, and when he didn't have to desperately analyze how clothes fit on his body, always adjusting and changing. Those were the days when he didn't feel fat when he ate, when the small amount of chub on his cheeks didn't feel like fifty pounds of weight. Those were the days where Damian could be happy, and he took advantage of them furiously.

Sometimes Damian thought that maybe the numbness was all in his head, that it was something that he could fix if he just tried enough. But whatever he did, nothing worked. Hiding in a corner, in a small space with the lights off seemed to do the most, giving Damian a small idea of safety in the midst of nothing and anxiety. The numbness seemed to almost have little to no triggers. Damian couldn't avoid anything to avoid it, and besides - sometimes being numb was easier than feeling. Feeling hurt, and Damian would sacrifice moments where he knew he should be happy but couldn't for ones where he should cry but found himself unable to. Anxiety had specific triggers, ones that would pop up randomly. Some days, he could stare out his bedroom window to the drop to the ground with only butterflies in his stomach, and others, he couldn't be on the same side as the window - because _what if it fell?_

Damian began to doubt himself as a sexual and romantic being. He was fully aware that whatever preference he had, it would not be remarked upon in this house. Brown was a lesbian, Cain pansexual, Grayson bi, Todd pan, and Drake both gender fluid and gay. All in all, Gordon and Father were the only heterosexual ones, and even then, they all had their doubts when Father returned from an outing with "colleagues" at work, going for a guy's night out, and returned with mussed hair and bruised lips, and when Gordon volunteered at the one hospital where a young lady three years Gordon's junior was in care, due to her own spinal cord injury. But Damian didn't feel attraction to people. When he saw them, he was too busy analyzing how they reacted, because if he could control how they felt he could control what they did, and eventually he began to realize that he found people attractive if they had a redeeming quality about them, like that they enjoyed classical music and not rap. If they had an appreciation for art and music, if they were either happy or just as broken as Damian. He found he could not find people attractive. And despite being told that it was normal, at his age, Damian felt he had a label for himself. He was asexual.

The world told him that he wasn't asexual, he just hadn't found an attractive person yet. That if he just gave it enough time, he could find another person to find sexually attractive, and then they could bubble him in with the others. The world told him that he couldn't be asexual forever - but for now, that was what Damian was. When asked why he never brought someone home, why he never moaned and complained about crushes, he told them. And they shrugged and said nothing negative and Drake told him that he himself thought he was asexual until he began to experiment. It may be _just a phase._

Damian was in his room now. Headphones heavy on his head, his cheeks drooping with unnecessary fat, his belly bulging, his chest numb, and firecrackers going off in his belly warning of danger. His back was to the corner, his feet and butt planted on the floor, and Drake's words heavy in his mind. Asexuality was just a phase. And if Damian was asexual and Damian was numb and Damian's body was just unnecessary-

Was he a phase too?

Damian couldn't answer that. Just pull his forehead closer to his knees and his knees closer to his chest.

Damian wasn't sure when it had started.


End file.
